A property management company has been ordered to pay €14,750 for discriminating against a tenant who returned home after spending weeks in a women’s refuge and found out her housing assistance payment (Hap) had been cancelled.
When Sanaa Qaddi sought to have the support restored by her local authority, Kierans Property Consultants refused to sign the application form. The company instead said it would “put in a complaint” to the council about non-payment of rent and the woman’s “threatening emails”.
In an equal status case before the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), Qaddi argued that the company’s decision placed her and her children under “enormous financial and emotional pressure at a time when we were already at our most vulnerable”.
WRC adjudicator Pat Brady described the company’s refusal to complete the form as a “clear breach” of housing assistance grounds under the Equal Status Acts. Noting the breach was at the “extreme of the spectrum of gravity”, Brady awarded Qaddi €14,750 and directed the company to immediately sign her Hap application.
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The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, which represented Qaddi in the case, said the ruling “sends an important message that people in receipt of Hap are protected from discrimination and that those providing accommodation must respect those rights”.
The WRC heard that Qaddi told the company she was in a “refuge for domestic issues temporarily” and reapplied for Hap upon her return in April 2025 to the property in Drogheda, Co Louth, after 25 days.
However, Brady found that the company “explicitly refused” to sign the Hap form.
In an email, the company said while it had “sympathy” for Qaddi’s “personal situation”, “we are not completing any more forms for Hap as we have already done so”.
Kierans Property Consultants said the property Qaddi lived in was causing the “most amount of problems” across the “large” portfolio of homes it managed.
As a “direct consequence of the respondent‘s failure to sign the application form”, overdue rent began to accumulate as the woman lost out on Hap, Brady said.
Brady said the situation bore all the signs of the company “‘having had enough’ of the complainant and simply deciding that it would not assist with her application”. He said it had “particularly petty” reasons for refusing to co-operate with the application, “and there is a suggestion of retribution for previous difficulties” with the woman.
The company, however, maintained that Qaddi had, among other things, breached the tenancy contract by stopping paying rent without a valid notice, that she had cancelled Hap and “abandoned the property/implied surrender”.
The company said it would not complete the Hap forms “on the basis that the applicant moved back in without permission and the landlord informed us of their intentions to sell”.
The adjudicator said there was “absolutely no basis for the respondent’s assertion that the tenancy had ended and the complainant moving in again after her return from therefuge was a new tenancy”. The local authority’s decision to terminate the woman’s payment was “extremely worrying”.
“While it may have been acting in compliance with some strict interpretation of the regulations which were not opened to the hearing, its actions had disproportionately and reasonably foreseeable adverse consequences for the complainant,” Brady said.
He suggested Hap regulations should contain an allowance for such situations, noting the termination of the payment could have “catastrophic consequences” for already distressed families.
